Hourly Gratification: The Poetics of Patience in an Age of Speed

Abstract: The first serious and sustained literary response to cultural acceleration in modern society comes not from Benjamin or Simmel, as some have suggested, nor the work of Baudelaire and Flaubert, but the poetic experiments of Wordsworth. At the turn of the nineteenth-century Wordsworth confronted an impatient mediascape, inhabited by readers requiring "outrageous stimulation" that the "rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies." He published poetry that programmatically tried the patience of his readers and changed the course of literary history. He also evolved a theory of patience, passion, and poetic genius that shaped literature and criticism through the twentieth century, but had its opponents early and late, from Percy Shelley to Raymond Williams.